I try a new early tomato every year. This year, Glacier was my earliest. They're OK. Early tomatoes don't impress me much. The best early I've grown was Matina. It was better to me than Bloody Butcher or Stupice. Personally, though, although it may not be considered an "early" tomato Jaune Flammee is always less than a week behind my earliest tomatoes, but even the first Jaune Flammee off the plant is as good to me as the best late season tomato. There is no early tomato that can compete with it for flavor, IMO. I try one new early variety every year just to extend the season a week, but I'd rather have more space in my garden for late season tomatoes, which are far superior in flavor.

When you say yellow, do you mean golden, like golden-orange, like Sungold was? or do you literally mean yellow? Also, Sungold F1 has a very unique smell to the plant--literally smell the leaves--do any smell similar in this generation? Are you growing an F1 to compare results? I'd select the best tasting, earliest, most productive golden one that looks the most like Sungold. I'd also select a potato leaf version, but keep the seeds separated. If you want to be even more precise, save even more traits separately: earliest fruiting/ripening plant highest production plant plant with fruit with the most resemblance to Sungold plant with foliage/smell the most resemblance to Sungold earliest most productive ripening red plant earliest most productive PL plant best tasting plant, regardless of color or production or earliness. As for PL, Craig said he thinks he had a PL one too... and while I'm working on a version that was F2 Sungold crossed with F2 Juliet, I now have a PL segregation in the F5, though can't say if it's because of Sungold parentage or Juliet parentage. My PL segregation produces larger fruits than the RL versions. And what started out as plums now are almost round. The small size may be attributed to the lack of care given to them and may have been different if watered & fertilized regularly. Things can also can change in the future as well. The problem now is further generations... and commitment. I don't know if you can rely anymore on volunteers and to do the "job" properly, you should save the corresponding seeds and then start them yourself (not relying on volunteers.) Maybe the only way to use volunteers is if your plants were spaced far enough away from each other so you knew precisely which plant the volunteers were from. Maybe you can get away with a dozen or 16 or so of each segregation, of course the more the better. Also, when saving the seeds, don't mix seeds together even if more than 1 plant had what appears to be similarities. And I didn't even mention the possibility of the seeds being crossed in the first generation or current generation, both which will affect the future outcome. Ideally, you want to pursue the best tasting, best resembling, most productive, earliest plant... but things can change down the road--you can still get surprises from others that didn't fit this description later in future generations. And you can even get great tasting ones in a later generation from ones that didn't taste great in earlier generations. Mark

Is the following statement true scientifically? A number of offspring from a self pollinating Hybrid, will bear the exact traits of the parent plant. And if the answer to that question is yes, then is also the following scientifically true? As each successive generation passes, the higher the percentage of offspring will bear the exact traits of the original parent plant. If someone could boil those two things down I think I might be able to grasp this a little better Now assuming all self-pollination, as far as I can reckon the first statement is true. However, the next argument is decidedly not true. What occurs at successive generations of self-pollination is a bias towards generating homozygous offspring for traits which will repeat with self-pollination. The hybrid typically has heterozygous genetic coding for some of its important traits and thus when these are rendered homozygous, they cannot revert back to the genetic coding of the hybrid assuming they self-pollinate. So with total randomness and self-pollination, eventually nearly all of the heterozygous hybrid characteristics are lost in the subsequent generations. At this point, the plant's offspring is NOT a hybrid but will have some individual homozygous types that display a potentially large array of disparity compared to that of their gr-gr-gr-gr-gr, etc. grandparents (the original hybrid). Some will be similar and some will be not similar compared to the hybrid ancestor and many will not be similar to their cousins. Actual populations of replicas of the ancestor hybrid will go bye-bye very fast with every successive generation upon selfing, (depending upon how many traits are involved in the hybrid's definition). Reggie

Another vote for AZOYCHKA> It is early/mid , very productive , good balanced taste. I have also grown pineapple. I likes it but it was on the late side for me. There are so many yellow/orange/gold varieties. How about Russian Orange ? It seems to be very popular. But it is said to have 90+ DTM.(red light !) I am also going to grow another Russian yellow: SAKHARNYI ZHELTYI. for the first time. It is supposed to be sweet and mid season. Some people swear by KB and KBX. I grew KB in 2015. Very lazy producer. So my biggest find is Azoychka so far. Sey